Richard Freeman writes: > Do we inspire them by telling them that anybody who has made this choice > in the past is not to be rewarded financially for doing so? This brings up a different point of view too. Why should just somebody be rewarded financially and not someone else? Why only people who are still in school, and not people who left school? I don't even want to think what might happen if there was something like Debian's DunkTank flame in here. > A bigger concern is this. Which is better for gentoo? Taking somebody > who has never worked on gentoo and paying them money to possibly > accomplish something on the project, or taking somebody who is already > doing quite a bit and pay them so that they can accomplish even more > without the distraction of a day job? Do you think that $4500 (which is, by now, less than €3000) during the summer will stop anybody already contributing from finding a day job? I sincerely don't think so. It does, though, help new people to _try_ working on Free Software. Students paid for SoC don't need to find a temporary job for that summer to build up experience (which is what I suppose most students would like to do, you can't expect a huge pay for three months of work _in the summer_), it's a good pay, for three months of work, but it's far from being a pay good enough for anybody to actively stop looking for a job. They will have to understand, though, that Gentoo is not a job and you won't end up always being paid to help that. Sincerely, I find the "without the distraction of a day job" argument to be pretty silly. How can an eventual, possible, not sure at all, and for sure not stable, check of €3000 once an year stop anybody from finding a dayjob? It's like counting on winning the lottery twice an year to sustain yourself. I live with my parents still, in the past years I had unstable jobs (paying more than €3000) during the start of the year and then had almost nothing between spring and winter, I have no monthly expenses, and I still struggle to find money to buy a new box. It might be an added incentive to get experience in Free Software rather than as a third-grade programmer helper in a small software company with most of the stable programmers taking weeks off for the summer, but for sure can't replace a stable job. -- Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò http://blog.flameeyes.eu/